A Heartbreaking Work of Fiction

Author and subject grin at the memory. Eggers, in a white shirt and a sport coat that's seen better days, is the shorter and more intense-looking of the two. Deng, in a black shirt and jeans, is tall -- as the Dinka people tend to be -- with a warm, gap-toothed smile.

They call each other "Dave" and "Val," but Eggers, who's 36, has had the luxury of keeping the same name all his life. Deng, who's a decade or so younger, has been known as "Achak" (the name his parents gave him), "Valentino" (a baptismal name), "Dominic" (from a teacher in a refugee camp), "Gone Far" (a nickname alluding to his long trek out of war-wracked Sudan) and, most poetically, "Sleeper" -- bestowed by a girl who found him lying in the road one day, half-blind and longing for death.

Here's how Eggers, in Deng's voice, describes the moment:

"I conjured my mother as best I could. I pictured her in yellow, yellow like an evening sun, walking down the path. . . . When she came up to me I told her I was too tired to continue, that I would suffer again, and would watch others suffer. . . . Then I washed her from my mind. It seemed to me that to die I needed to clear my mind of all thoughts, all visions, and concentrate on passing on."

You look like my dead brother, the girl said. She lifted him up and got him walking again.

* * *

Lost Boys is a name attached to thousands of young refugees from the civil war in southern Sudan, which broke out in the mid-1980s and continued until peace was finally negotiated in 2005. "It is not a nickname appreciated by many in our ranks," as Deng the book character puts it, "but it is apt enough."

These days, Deng and the roughly 4,000 other Lost Boys who were resettled in the United States often find themselves confused with victims of more recent savagery in Darfur. But while the atrocities committed by government-backed militiamen have been similar -- "the difference is just the name they're using to describe the militia," he says -- Darfur is in western Sudan. Marial Bai, the home town from which Deng was driven in fear of his life, is farther south.

His journey began in the mid-'80s, when, as a 6-year-old, he was still young enough "to be weak and melt into his mother's arms." Trouble had been brewing between the African peoples of southern Sudan and the Arab-dominated government in the north. But the boy knew nothing of the complex history behind the conflict.

"I couldn't understand," he says. "There was me in my town, my father was doing well -- why do we want to go to war? No reason."

Reason or no, war came.

Arab militiamen on horseback overran Marial Bai. Deng saw his home town burned, his friends and neighbors killed or abducted. Not knowing his parents' fate, he fell in with a group of similarly displaced boys. An adult leader set them walking toward Ethiopia, where they were told they would find a haven, despite having no idea what "an Ethiopia" was.